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Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time
Reading 1 Jer 20:7-9
O LORD, thou hast seduced me, and I was seduced;
thou wert stronger than I and hast overcome me;
I am in derision daily; everyone mocks me.
For since I spoke out, I raised my voice crying, Violence and destruction;
because the word of the LORD has been a reproach unto me and a derision, daily.
And I said, I will not make mention of him, nor speak any more in his name.
But he was in my heart as a burning fire and within my bones;
I tried to forbear, and I could not.
Jubilee Bible 2000 http://www.biblestudytools.com/jub/jeremiah/20.html
Gospel Mt 16: 21-27
Jesus began to show his disciples
that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer greatly
from the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes,
and be killed and on the third day be raised.
Then Peter took Jesus aside and began to rebuke him,
"God forbid, Lord! No such thing shall ever happen to you."
He turned and said to Peter,
"Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle to me.
You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do."
Then Jesus said to his disciples,
"Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself,
take up his cross, and follow me.
For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it,
but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.
What profit would there be for one to gain the whole world
and forfeit his life?
Or what can one give in exchange for his life?
For the Son of Man will come with his angels in his Father's glory,
and then he will repay all according to his conduct."
http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/090317.cfm
You seduced me, Lord, …but it's my own fault for letting myself be seduced!
This is a great opening for a weekly assembly of the community!
I wonder did Jeshua feel the way Jeremiah felt? His job was to warn people of violence and outrage to come, and all he got for his trouble was derision and laughter? Jeshua's approach was certainly different, and his end was even worse. He tried to not frighten people but to gently seduce them into living truthful lives, being motivated to do the very best they could rather than being limited in fulfilling the demands of law. They would give 'full measure, pressed down and flowing over', and as they gave so they would receive.
Too good to be true. It is seductive, but is it too easy? If people actually lived that way they would be free, immune from being manipulated by profiteers. He offered a real solution, so they killed him.
. . . . .
Chapter 16 of Matthew's gospel marks a new step in the process of teaching about Jeshua. The heady days of his revolutionary teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, the amazing happenings, the large crowds in awe of him, all this is behind us now. Things have settled into a pattern and it's time to take stock of where we stand. The point has been reached when we can be asked, as CathyT put it last week, “Who do YOU say that he is?”
For the occasion Jeshua took his disciples on a picnic. They travelled 40 km up the Jordan valley to the the river's source at the foot of Mt Hermon. Paneas is an idyllic place where ancient peoples celebrated their festivals in the company of sprites that live in springs and leafy glades. http://www.bibleplaces.com/banias/ The Tetrarch Phillip II made the place his administrative capital and named it Caesarea to honour his Roman patrons. I imagine Jeshua avoided the town and led his group to the refreshing beauty of the grotto and the spring. It was there that he put the key question to them: What do you feel about me? Who do you think I am?
It's a very personal question and they hesitated. There was an embarrassing silence until someone gave Peter a nudge. This will sound ridiculous, he thought to himself. His mouth was dry. His voice came as a hoarse whisper: "I think you must be the messiah!" he said.
Jeshua said nothing, which didn't help, so Peter added something that seemed appropriate in that ancient place of rituals to pagan gods: "You are the child of the Living God."
It was an enormous thing to say because they had become familiar friends with Jeshua. They knew his strength and they had seen his weaknesses. They'd seen him get tired, feel disillusioned by the fickle enthusiasms of the crowds; they knew he could become depressed at the sight of people he could not help, and fiercely angry with the system and those who ran it. But there was something about him that pointed to greatness. There was a sense of purpose in him that commanded respect. And then there were the signs he gave, deliberately selected as messianic signs, as he had told John the baptiser when John was in prison. His teaching was most impressive in the way he spoke with authority even when the people wouldn't listen, or when they mocked him as an upstart.
In the gospel narrative this question represents a stage of development that the disciples had reached, a joint profession of faith with Peter as spokesperson. If we see the gospel as a compendium for the instruction of new members in the community, this episode marks the end of the first phase of their education.
A new phase is about to begin.
“From this time on,” Matthew writes, “Jeshua began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer greatly.” We need to recall that people expected the messiah to be a conquering hero; some hoped he would lead a rebellion against the Romans and re-establish the autonomy of the nation. In this light Peter's surprising protest was more than an emotional outburst from a close friend. What Jeshua is saying throws into question the very idea of a messiah. What was he thinking? The messiah could not be arrested, imprisoned, executed! That wouldn't do at all!
I imagine Jeshua had planned this moment carefully, working out when and how to show them the other side of the coin. Matthew says this was a beginning; the instruction went on from that time, right through to the end in fact. They found the adjustment impossible to make, as still today we find it the greatest obstacle of all: Why did he have to suffer? Why does anyone have to suffer? What is it about pain that goodness seems to come from it as from nothing else? Why is pain essential to the process of life?
Birthing, growing, changing, evolving, maturing, dying - even being 'saved' - all involve pain. Why?
The new recruits in the community would have to work on this problem over many weeks; it remains for everyone a lifetime challenge. Instinctively we find ourselves looking for the wonder-working saviour who will wave his magic wand and make us whole again, free us from whatever troubles we are bogged in. Jeshua must have had to work it out for himself. He must have searched through the scriptures until he found something in the poems of Isaiah that spoke mysteriously of a suffering servant. Gradually it dawned on him that this had to be his path because it is the only way to get the job done. It's just the way things work.
“No, Peter,” he replies quite sternly. “The way you feel about this is the human way, the way of the world: crush the evil, trample down the obstacles in your path, use force to lay low your enemies, and that will solve all your problems. But, you know, it doesn't work, does it!
“I think,” Jeshua continued, “that God feels differently. Surely the Father knows all our problems which, incidentally, consist entirely in the wrongs that people do to one another. For a thousand years we've had kings and strong men trying to establish a united and peaceful kingdom for God's chosen people by the usual means - armed force and tough rule to crush the opposition, and look where it has got us. It's enough to make the angels weep. There has to be another way, and it seems to me that Isaiah got it right when he said that the one who does it God's way is not going to use force like that but is going to absorb the pain, take the insult and the hurt and not hit back. The antagonism that constitutes the sin of this world - people dominating others, using and abusing others, hurting others and even taking pleasure in seeing others hurt – all this can only end when good people refuse to hit back. We must learn to take it, and leave the restoration of right order to God. In his own good time the Father will raise us up to new life."
The gospels give us a short summary of the teaching Jeshua began that day, a couple of dozen words: “he must go to Jerusalem and suffer greatly from the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed and on the third day be raised." It's a fair bet that they came back to it again and again. Every line Isaiah wrote about that suffering servant would have been analysed and discussed.
Clearly sin is the problem, our sin; God's chosen servant will suffer “for our sin”. What does this mean?
It is a tragedy that a basically pagan explanation gradually took hold in christian thinking. In struggling to find ways to explains this elusive mystery, the earliest writer, Paul, used some phrases from which there developed a substitution theory: the saviour was made a sacrifice to substitute for us. Or an atonement theory: God is pleased that his Son by suffering has made up for all the wrong that people do. He took our sins, and offered himself as a victim to placate divine justice, and so peace was made between the human and the divine. I suspect that Paul had a better grasp of it than he could find the words for. Probably we all do, and that's as it should be, but we need to avoid short-changing the mystery with some transaction theory that would make of pain a ransom price to pay off our debts with. Jeshua's raw pain suffered in the shedding of his precious blood cannot surely be a satisfaction price paid to God for the debt of sin.
I simply cannot imagine Jeshua expounding to the disciples that the demands of divine justice required that his blood be shed in a sacrifice of atonement, that only by his shaming, torture and cruel Roman execution could sin be forgiven and peace be brought to an alienated world. It runs contrary to his portrayal of the Father as forgiving and merciful. It makes a joke of his story about a 'prodigal' son and an incredibly prodigal father, or his words to the woman they brought to him accused of adultery: Where are your accusers? Does no one condemn you? Neither do I!' It's worth remembering that the worst thing the prophets could say about Israel was to call it an adulterous nation.
He is going to suffer but not because of any requirement on God's part. It is because that's how life is on this planet. Nothing improves without some stress, and if you want to straighten out the greatest wrong of all - the lying and deceit that rules the world, you had better be aware that the evil holding the world in thrall will hit back with a vengeance. It is our sins that caused his pain, that killed him. God's action comes into play again in raising him: 'See, it didn't work! You tried to destroy my work and even my anointed one and I bring him back to life; you reject my love and I pour out my Spirit over all peoples.'
What is God thinking today? I wonder how does God feel about the conflict among christians, between those who hold to an old substitution theory and those who find it repugnant? Incidentally, I ask how does God “feel” because there's a Greek word in Mt 16:23 that gives translators much trouble: phroneis. 'We have: thinking God's thoughts (ISV), setting your mind on (NASB), seeing things merely from a [ ] point of view (NLT), savour (King James & Douai), understand (Jubilee), and so on and on.
The word phroneis is difficult to translate into English because it combines the visceral and cognitive aspects of thinking. I feel that our expression, 'gut reaction' , could come close. It is not a common term in the bible, and it's use here might point to an awareness in the early christian communities that all the reasoning in the world won't solve the problem of the gut-wrenching reaction we have to pain, and to a suffering saviour. In any case we need to realise that it makes no sense at all to say the Father was thinking that his beloved Son should suffer and die to balance the books of divine justice, as theologians and the whole church have taught almost from the beginning. I'd rather say the Father's gut reaction would be against any such an idea.
In saying the Anointed One must suffer, Isaiah is just being realistic, and this must be the Father's position too: the reality is that in this evolving cosmos heat, tension, stress and abrasion are all essential to the process. In us these equate to pain. On top of that we have this special characteristic, that we have the capacity to cause pain to each other, and indeed enjoy the benefit we might draw from it. We can even enjoy the sight of others squirming under pain we inflict on them. This is sick. This is sin. But this is the reality the Father sees.
We know, for it is common experience, that often the only help we can give one suffering is to sit beside them and show that we are willing to be with them in their pain. Being there we may help them to not allow their thinking to turn bitter, we may keep their hope alive, help them avoid despair. This is the basic level at which God's Anointed One will save us from the lonely bind of pain and death. He will show us that the Father knows how it is. In the experience of this special Chosen One, this Child who is loved, God knows our pain from the human side.
Jeshua is the compassion of God on display. This is God saying: 'I know. I know how you feel.' That's why he was sent, to show us thatthe Father knows what it's like, and we shouldn't be afraid.
. . . . . .
There is another way of seeing it. He has to die “for our sin”; he has to die because our sin makes him die. We kill prophets. We throw the whistleblowers into jails, accusing them of exposing our secrets, the wrongs we have done that we need keep hidden. Jeshua exposed whatever wrongs he met. He taught the people around him to see the hypocrisy of the elders, the chief priests and the scribes, and advised them not to follow their evil ways. He called them liars to their face. He stood before Pilate in witness to the truth.
He could do no less because lying must be confronted with the truth, and once you speak out you can't back down, even if they kill you for it. That's just the way it is. That's reality.
And that is the way God sees it. It makes sense, but the reason more of us are not whistleblowers – the reason most of us go along with things we know are wrong – is that we feel we can't make a difference so why throw away our lives in a useless gesture? God's answer to this is given in raising Jeshua from the grave, after three days. It shows that sin, and its symbol which is 'death', has been overcome and we shall all be raised up in the end.
So we continue to speak the truth to power for only by this can the bind of evil's lie be broken.